At length, when melancholy ran off us instead of being absorbed, because we had passed the saturation-point, we rose and departed. Yes, incandescent-mantles and motor-boats were not the only changes in Bruges. And in the café adjoining the one we had left a troupe of girls in white were performing gaily to a similar audience of habitués. We glimpsed them through the open door. And in front of the kinematograph a bell was ringing loudly and continuously to invite habitués, and no habitués were responding. It was all extremely mysterious. The chimes of the belfry flung their strident tunes across the sky, and the thought of these and of the habitués gave birth in us to a suspicion that perhaps, after all, Bruges had not changed.
We moved away out of the Grande Place into the maze of Bruges toward the Quai Spinola, our footsteps echoing along empty streets and squares of large houses the fronts of which showed dim and lofty rooms inhabited by the historical past and also no doubt by habitués. And after much wandering I had to admit that I was lost in Bruges, a city which I was supposed to know like my birthplace. And at the corner of a street, beneath an incandescent-mantle, we had to take out a map and unfold it and peer at it just as if we had belonged to the lowest rank of tourists.
As we submitted ourselves to this humiliation, the carillon of the belfry suddenly came to us over a quarter of a mile of roofs. Not the clockwork chimes now, but the carillonneur himself playing on the bells, a bravura piece, delicate and brilliant. The effect was ravishing, as different from that of the clockwork chimes as a piano from a barrel-organ. All the magic of Bruges was reawakened in its pristine force. Bruges was no more a hackneyed rendezvous for cheap trippers and amateur painters and poverty-stricken English bourgeois and their attendant chaplains. It was the miraculous Bruges of which I had dreamed before I had ever even seen the place—just that.
Having found out where we were in relation to the Quai Spinola, we folded up the map and went forward. The carillon ceased, and began again, reaching us in snatches over the roofs in the night wind. We passed under the shadows of rococo churches, the façades and interiors of which are alike neglected by those who take their pleasures solely according to the instructions of guide-books, and finally we emerged out of the maze upon a long lake, pale bluish-gray in the gloom. And this lake was set in a frame of pale bluish-gray houses with stepwise gables, and by high towers, and by a ring of gas-lamps, all sleeping darkly. And on the lake floated the Velsa, like the phantom of a ship, too lovely to be real, and yet real. It was the most magical thing.